This Week in Fiction: Dagoberto Gilb

Dagoberto Gilb, the author of this week's story, "Uncle Rock,” exchanged e-mails with Cressida Leyshon, a fiction editor at the magazine, about the Dodgers, immigration, and leading a charmed life.

This week’s story is set in Los Angeles. It’s not clear in what era it’s taking place until the young protagonist, Erick, goes to a baseball game and it becomes apparent that the players are from the Dodgers’ line-up of the early eighties. Why did you decide to set the story then? How important were the Dodgers’ players in that decision?

Stories are mosaics to me: Broken chunks and shards of time, experience, imagination, invention, learning, that I turn into a new image. I used the years when my own sons were Erick's age, when we used to go to Dodger games, the bleachers, and hang around for autographs. I myself caught a batting-practice home-run ball at Dodger Stadium. I was so very pleased, and then I lost it almost instantly. A note comparable to the one Erick got once came to me to give to my own mom (nope, don't remember what it said, just that it flipped me). I had a lot of trouble trying to think of Roque's name. A lot of the hold-up on the story was not knowing what to call his character. Then, a few months ago, I was in Kenedy, Texas, and I met a man an Anglo woman told me was named Rocky—that's how she pronounced it anyway. There it was. And, finally, it had to be that Fernando Valenzuela period! Those were the best Mexican years ever in L.A. Pride was everywhere, everybody dug Fernando. And though we never got one of Pedro Guerrero's homers those years, he hit 'em near us, and we tried.

Erick’s mother is a Mexican immigrant. He’s never been to Mexico, but he’s heard his mother’s stories and he sees the country “as if it were the backdrop of a movie on afternoon TV.” Your mother also came from Mexico. Did you ever visit the country as a child, or was it a place that you also knew through second-hand stories?

Until my teen-age years, when there came mandatory trips to Tijuana to find the cheapest tuck-and-roll car upholstering, I never thought of going. Mexico was the scary place that my mom, who has been here since before she was ten, could be deported to if immigration even glimpsed her. Apparently my father, an American, added fuel to her phobia when he was most wounded by her (which I think was for a while) and he threatened her with this. My father was the super at an industrial laundry downtown, where he met her, and the laundry was raided often enough. Most of the workers were from Mexico, so yes, the stories I heard were second-hand, but when they told them they didn’t just sound as if they were from bad movies.

Ever since your first collection of stories, “The Magic of Blood,” was published back in 1993, you’ve been hailed as a Chicano writer, a Latino writer, a Hispanic writer, and a Mexican-American writer. Does that sense of identity help you when you’re at work or can it ever feel constraining?

For many years I felt identity-confused. Very solitary. In college I studied philosophy and religion. I devoured foreign lit. The Russians, French, Latin-American boomers. Beckett. The old Grove Press outsiders. Juan Rulfo. Then I saw Luis Valdez's Teatro Campesino plays. I read Rolando Hinojosa and Tomás Rivera—firsts in the Chicano commnity. And then I started writing. The stories that came out of me were from a culture and region I knew and lived. I am Mexican-American, I am Chicano (I don't love the tag Hispanic, but it's used innocently enough in South Texas), I am Latino. In Mexico, I'm an American writer (well, americano). I love that! I'm proud of all those labels now.

You recently joined the University of Houston-Victoria, in Texas, as the executive director of the newly-founded Centro Victoria for Mexican-American Literature and Culture. Why was the center founded and what are you hoping you’ll be able to achieve in your role there?

Mexican-Americans make up two-thirds of the Latino demographic in the U.S., and in the next few years, Texas will be fifty per cent Latino. And yet there is nothing in the schools about the history or culture of the children sitting at those desks. Reading, literature, is offered as though it were like math—distant, abstract, nothing to do with neighborhoods they and their families live in. Centro Victoria has put together six weeks of lessons—texts and class plans—about the culture, by Mexican-Americans, for high-school English teachers. The guide is called "Made in Texas," and it hopes to educate all Texas students—brown, white, black—about who Mexican-Americans are and how they live right here in the United States, where their community is at home, where there is a two-hundred-year history on this very soil.

I was shocked when I heard that you’d had a stroke last year. How are you feeling now? Did it affect your writing at all?

A year ago this week, I didn't even know what a stroke was. And it has been hard physically, the damage to the body serious. But I have had such a charmed life. I think of my closest friend's cousin, a friend, too, who came back from Vietnam a parapalegic. He was barely twenty, and was bitter for so long after. Now it's Iraq and Afghanistan. I had always been athletic, and many friends tore up their toes and knees and arms. For a decade and a half my wage was in construction, high-rise, and plenty of injuries happen on jobsites. Not to me. Charmed: I wrote stories, and they started getting published. The worst consequence of this event now is the loss of my right hand. That is, I can't hold a pen. Can't autograph my books, only xxxx. But the good news is that four months ago I started using the right hand—a finger—on the keyboard. Typing gets better every month. I wrote this story! And so I'm writing again. Charmed: Look where I am writing this now—see what I mean? And, well, I am still so pretty, too.

Like Erick, you spent your childhood in Los Angeles, but you have lived in Texas for many years. Are you a baseball fan yourself? Do you follow the Dodgers? Have you switched your allegiance to the Astros or the Rangers?

I think baseball is the best sport to go out to and watch. I was a big Dodger fan as a kid, and I wanted my sons to be, too. I left L.A. In El Paso, we had the Double-A Diablos for years, and I coached Little League—both my boys were good. In Austin, it's as hard to get tickets to see the University of Texas’s baseball team, the Longhorns, as it is the Lakers. The only major-league stadium near me now (three hours—close in Texas miles) is in Houston. I only think of going. I have been following the Dodgers again, now that Manny's there. Truth is, I'm all b-ball, all the time, and with the playoffs, I'm loving TV these months (heaven-sent this time last year while I was in a hospital bed). I say this: It'll be Kobe vs. LeBron. I'm sorry, but I'm always for the Lakers.

(Photograph: Nancy Crampton)

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